Amid the final push to pass the Senate tax plan, which is at a
make-or-break moment today, Republicans have now hatched two separate
schemes, each designed to win over a different bloc of undecided senators.
But the two maneuvers could contradict each other and the contradiction
would neatly reveal the big scam at the heart of this whole enterprise.

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Several deficit-hawk senators, such as Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Flake
(R-Ariz.), are demanding that some kind of trigger be added to the bill,
which would raise taxes later if the plans tax cuts end up adding to the
deficit. The bill would boost the deficit by $1.4 trillion in the short
term. Some Republicans have argued that the spectacular growth unleashed
by the plan would offset that, but Corker and company (and many
economists) are skeptical; hence the demand for a tax-hike trigger. As of
now, how this trigger would work, and whose taxes would go up, are
unspecified.

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At the same time, Senate Republicans are currently looking at ways to make
the bill more generous to owners of pass-through businesses, to win over
holdouts Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Steve Daines of Montana. Research
has shown that most pass-through income goes to the top 1 percent: As the
New York Times put it, to win them over, Republicans are increasingly
tilting their plan to benefit wealthy Americans.

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But heres the rub of the matter: As one tax analyst tells me, if
Republicans make the plan more generous to the wealthy by doing more for
pass-throughs (to win over some senators), this would also add to the
deficit (which should drive away the others). And this leads us right back
to the con at the heart of this whole affair.

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The center of the Senate GOP tax plan is a large permanent cut to the tax
rate paid by corporations. These would themselves overwhelmingly benefit
the wealthy, because the vast majority of their benefits would go to
shareholders and capital. But Republicans face two challenges. The first
is to sell this primarily as a middle-class tax cut, so voters accept it.
They do this by front-loading a bunch of preferences for the middle class
along with cuts to individual rates across the board. The second challenge
is to do this while simultaneously making the case that the plan would not
balloon the deficit, to hold on to deficit-hawk senators and because if it
raises the deficit in the long term, procedurally it cant pass by simple
majority with only Republican votes. Republicans address this problem by
ending all the middle-class preferences and individual rate cuts after
2025.

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But the problem is that the second imperative undermines the first.
Because the middle-class benefits must be temporary to avoid busting the
long-term deficit, analyses have found that in the long run, it would
shower enormous long-term benefits on the rich while the benefits to the
middle class fade away and taxes go up later for many less-fortunate
earners. The whole point of back-loading the losses on to that latter
group later is to prevent the permanent corporate tax cuts from ballooning
the long-term deficit, allowing a huge permanent tax cut overwhelmingly
benefiting the rich to pass with no Democrats.